… we haven’t had a good drug panic for a few years*, so it was obviously slightly overdue. Hearing the calls for a ban on mephedrone instantly recalled the Simpson’s Maude Flanders: 
There is also a delicious irony, which you should join me in enjoying immensely, as the report from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs into the banning of legal highs such as mephedrone has been delayed by the resignation of an advisor, Dr Les King, in support of Prof David Nutt, forced out of his job by imbeciles for the crime of saying something sensible about drugs for a change.
Calls for a ban seem to be mounting and it will be a brave government that manages to resist the temptation to be seen to be doing something about such a tabloid front-page-friendly story this close to an election. Once again, it seems we will miss an opportunity to sensibly consider our drugs policy and its effects, intended and otherwise, on our safety and security.
Banning mephedrone, as with other substances, will do anything but make it safer. Production will then pass into the hands of unscrupulous people, outside of any regulatory framework and with no control over potency or contamination. There is a suspicion that the batch of the drug taken by those who died in the Scunthorpe case was contaminated. Instead, we would be better to focus our attention on education for users and the treatment of addicts.
If we are mature enough to accept that human beings will always seek out ways to escape reality, be it by heroin, khat or a caramel macchiato, then we can try to lessen the harm. Leah Betts’ name will always be connected to ecstasy, but she arguably might be alive today if she had known about water intoxication. It is too early to say, but it could be that drinking heavily in combination with the stimulant mephedrone puts the heart under excess strain. Regardless, deaths this year from miaow miaow, and from E, will be dwarfed by the numbers of us dying because of over-indulging in our favourite tipples. Yet we won’t be seeing too many calls for the banning of gin and tonics across the front pages.
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* Of course, we did drug panics much better when I were a young ‘un. I think we will be waiting a long time until mephedrone spawns something as amazing as the ‘Inspector Morse ecstasy episode‘:
[the doctor offers first Morse and then Lewis an ecstasy tablet]
Dr. Hallett: Lewis?
Detective Sergeant Lewis: No thanks, Sir. Not in front of the Chief Inspector.
Well quite.
3 Comments
Wednesday 17 March 2010 at 8:03 pm
Grrrrr……..Naturally these kids were on the front of The Metro today….yet another tragic accident ( I use that word deliberately) to be used against the rest of us. No one likes stories like this and the death of two young lads who only wanted to have a good time is of course truly awful, but I feel exasperated by the knowledge that this awful one-off is bound to form the basis of the next tory/labour/any old idiots manifesto. Ah well… Makes me think of David Mitchell in the Observer this weekend…. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/14/david-mitchell-column-jon-venables-dangerous-dogs . Seems like any old excuse is all you need to turn one person’s tragedy into your reason and tired old justification to talk absolute tripe…..
Wednesday 17 March 2010 at 8:52 pm
That’s exactly it. Almost every death is tragic to someone but to the rest of us it’s pretty much a statistical anomaly. It’s awful for their families and on a human level I wish them no harm, but I don’t want politicians to be using this as the basis for policy because it leads to monumental cock-ups like the Dangerous Dogs Act.
Sunday 21 March 2010 at 12:34 pm
[...] Roll up, roll up… looked on in dismay at yet another drug panic [...]